Jaroslav Pelikan
Trans. by SHA Mei

Description

The second volume of Professor Pelikan's monumental work of The Christian Tradition is the most comprehensive historical treatment of Eastern Christian thought from 600 to 1700 written in recent years. This volume covers the great Christological controversies of the seventh century, the debate on icons in the 8th and 9th, attitudes to Jews, to Muslims, to the dualistic heresies of the high Middle Ages, to the post-Reformation churchs of Western Europe. The line that separated Eastern Christendom from Western on the medieval map is similar to the "iron curtain" of recent times. Linguistic barriers, political divisions, and liturgical differences combine to isolate the two cultures from each other. Pelikan explains the divisions between Eastern and Western Christendom and identifies and describes the development of the distinctive forms taken by Christian doctrine in its Greek, Syriac and early Slavic tradition. The table of contents includes:

The Authority of the Fathers
The Changeless Truth of Salvation
The Norms of Traditional Doctrine
The Councils and Their Achievements
Knowing the Unknowable

Union and Division in Christ
Duality of Hypostates
One Incarnate Nature of God the Logos
Actions and Wills in Unison
Christ the Universal Man

Images of the Invisible
Images Graven and Ungraven
Images as Idols
Images as Icons
The Melody of Theology

The Challenge of the Latin Church
The Orthodoxy of Old Rome
The Foundation of Apostolic Polity
The Theological Origins of the Schism
The Filioque

The Vindication of Trinitarian Monotheism
Trinity and Shema
Evil and the God of Love
The One God--And His Prophets
The God of the Philosophers

The Last Flowering of Byzantine Orthodoxy
The Mystic as New Theologian
The Final Break with Western Doctrine
The Definition of Eastern Particularity
The Heir Apparent

OFASC Theological Review

Read with discretion. Translated and published by non-Orthodox and underwritten by the Orthodox Brotherhood of Saints Apostles Peter and Paul in Hong Kong. Author completed this volume originally in English in 1974 prior to his reception into Orthodoxy in 1998. Members of Dr Pelikan's family remember him saying that he had not as much converted to Orthodoxy as "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there."